Wilhelm Hosenfeld was a German army officer whose name became linked to one of the most famous rescue stories of World War II. Stationed in Warsaw during the German occupation of Poland, he used his position to help persecuted Poles and Jews, including the pianist Wladyslaw Szpilman.
Hosenfeld was born on May 2, 1895, in Hesse, then part of the German Empire. His family was Catholic, and he grew up in a conservative, patriotic environment. He trained as a teacher, following in his father's footsteps, and his upbringing emphasized Christian charitable work alongside Prussian obedience and German patriotism.
When World War I began on July 28, 1914, Hosenfeld enlisted in the German Army and served as an infantryman. He returned home seriously wounded in 1917 and received the Iron Cross, Second Class, for his service.
After the war ended on November 11, 1918, Hosenfeld worked as a school teacher. In 1920 he married Annemarie Krummacher, a pastor's daughter, and the marriage produced five children.
On January 30, 1933, Adolf Hitler was appointed chancellor of Germany. Few professional groups supported Hitler as fanatically as German teachers, and Hosenfeld was no exception in the early stages of the Nazi regime. He joined the SA in 1933 and became a member of the Nazi Party two years later.
In 1936 he attended the Nuremberg rally and wrote in his diary that he was overwhelmed by the experience of the large group in which he marched. That same year he described Hitler as a great public speaker who was persuasive.
His views changed after he read Hitler's 1925 autobiographical manifesto, "Mein Kampf," and witnessed the deadly consequences of the Nazi rise to power. He grew disillusioned with the regime and kept journals detailing the abuse of Jews and others.
World War II began on September 1, 1939, when Germany invaded Poland. Warsaw suffered heavy air attacks and artillery bombardment, and German troops entered the capital on September 29. The campaign in Poland ended on October 6 with Germany and the Soviet Union dividing and annexing the country.
On November 23, 1939, German civilian occupation authorities required Warsaw's Jews to identify themselves by wearing white armbands with a blue Star of David. Jewish schools were closed, Jewish-owned property was confiscated, Jewish men were conscripted into forced labor, and pre-war Jewish organizations were dissolved.
The 44-year-old Hosenfeld was drafted into the German Army in August 1939, a week before the attack on Poland. He served in various locations in Poland before being transferred to Warsaw in July 1940, where he remained until the end of the war. He rose from the rank of sergeant to captain and worked as a sports and culture officer, responsible for sporting events at the Army stadium in Warsaw.
On October 12, 1940, German authorities decreed the establishment of a ghetto in Warsaw. All Jewish residents were required to move into a designated area, which was sealed off from the rest of the city in November 1940. In December, the Germans imposed the death penalty on Jews who left the ghetto without permission, and the same penalty awaited anyone who knowingly sheltered them.
The Warsaw Ghetto became the largest of all Jewish ghettos in Nazi-occupied Europe. It was enclosed by a wall more than 10 feet high, topped with barbed wire and closely guarded. Its population, swollen by Jews forced in from nearby towns, was estimated at more than 400,000 people.
Residents were forced to live in an area of 1.3 square miles, with an average of 7.2 people per room. Many homes lacked running water, and proper hygiene was almost impossible. Extreme overcrowding, minimal rations and unsanitary conditions led to disease, starvation and the deaths of thousands of Jews each month.
An average daily food ration in 1941 for Jews in Warsaw was limited to 184 calories, compared with 2,613 calories for Germans. An official German order stated that the basic provisioning of the Jewish residential district must be less than the minimum necessary for preserving life, regardless of the consequences.
Hunger in the ghetto was so severe that dying people lay in the streets and small children were seen begging. Between 1940 and mid-1942, 83,000 Jews died of starvation and disease. Widespread smuggling of food and medicines supplemented the official allotments and kept the death rate from rising even further.
When a resident of the Warsaw Ghetto died, families would place the body in the street, where it was collected each morning by a funeral cart.
Hosenfeld was disgusted by the regime's oppression of Poles, the persecution of the Polish clergy and the abuse of the Jews. He also opposed the beginning of the Final Solution, the Nazi plan to systematically exterminate Europe's Jewish population. He felt sympathy for all peoples in occupied Poland and was ashamed of what some of his countrymen were doing.
Hosenfeld befriended numerous Poles and tried to learn Polish. He attended Mass, received Holy Communion and went to confession in Polish churches, even though this was forbidden.
His help to victims began as early as autumn 1939, when he allowed Polish prisoners of war access to their families against regulations. He also successfully pushed for the early release of at least one prisoner. Among others, he saved the priest Antoni Jarz from the SS and later helped his brother-in-law.
One of the Jews he saved was Leon Warm, who escaped from a train to Treblinka during the 1942 deportations from Warsaw. Warm made it back into the city and survived with Hosenfeld's help, employed at the sports stadium and provided with a false identity.
On April 19, 1943, the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising began after German troops and police entered the ghetto to deport its surviving inhabitants to forced labor camps in the Lublin District. The ghetto inhabitants offered organized resistance, inflicting casualties on well-armed and well-equipped SS and police units in the first days of the operation.
They continued to resist deportation as individuals or in small groups for four weeks. It was the largest uprising by Jews during World War II and the first significant urban revolt against the German occupation in Europe.
In the end, the Germans raised the ghetto to the ground, burning and demolishing it block by block to smoke out their prey. The operation ended on May 16, when Jurgen Stroop, who led the suppression of the uprising, announced in his daily report that the former Jewish quarter in Warsaw was no more.
After the Nazis crushed the uprising, Hosenfeld wrote in his diary that "these animals" were responsible for the horrible mass murder of Jews. He wrote that Germany had lost the war, brought an eternal curse on itself and would be forever covered with shame. He added that Germans had no right to compassion or mercy and all shared in the guilt.
He recorded that one officer boasted of firing his pistol at Jews jumping from the windows of burning houses, and wrote that he was ashamed to walk in the city. All that was left of the ghetto were ruins, and every Pole had the right to spit on Germans, he wrote.
Hosenfeld also described Treblinka, where cattle cars were being emptied and most people were already dead, with corpses piled on top of each other by the rail tracks. Healthy men had to carry the corpses away and dig up the graves, and were finally shot themselves, while women and children were undressed and gassed. "We are all guilty," he wrote.
Hosenfeld smuggled his diary home in dirty laundry. In 1944, if it had been discovered, he would probably have been executed for treason.
On August 1, 1944, the Warsaw Uprising began when the Polish Home Army, a non-communist underground resistance army with units throughout German-occupied Poland, rose against the German occupation authorities to liberate Warsaw. During the uprising, Hosenfeld had to interrogate captured fighters of the Polish underground. Against the instructions of the SS leadership, he ensured that the wounded received medical treatment and demanded that they be treated in accordance with the Geneva Conventions.
His help to another Jew became famous through the film "The Pianist," based on the life story of Wladyslaw Szpilman. Szpilman was a talented musician and a well-respected figure in the Polish music scene before the war. At the time of the German invasion in September 1939, he was a celebrity and a featured soloist at Polish Radio, which was bombed on September 23, 1939, shortly after broadcasting the last Szpilman recital.
Szpilman supported his family by playing in various cafes, but everyone in his family, including his mother, father, brother and two sisters, was deported in 1942 to the Treblinka extermination camp, where they were murdered. Szpilman stayed in the Warsaw Ghetto as a laborer and helped smuggle weapons for the coming Jewish resistance uprising.
Szpilman remained in the ghetto until February 13, 1943, shortly before it was abolished after the deportation of most of its inhabitants in April and May of that year. He then found places to hide in Warsaw and survived with the help of friends from Polish Radio and fellow musicians. After the uprising in the summer of 1944, the Polish population was evicted from the city, and Szpilman remained alone, hiding in the ruins of the destroyed city, hungry, frozen, frightened and with no support.
Hosenfeld came across Szpilman in an abandoned building in August 1944 during a routine tour of Warsaw. To Szpilman's surprise, the officer did not arrest or kill him. After discovering that the emaciated Szpilman was a pianist, Hosenfeld asked him to play something on the piano on the ground floor. Szpilman played Chopin's Nocturne in C Minor.
After that, the officer brought him bread and jam. On numerous occasions he also offered Szpilman one of his coats to keep warm in the freezing temperatures. Thanks to Hosenfeld's food and supplies, Szpilman managed to survive the critical final weeks before liberation in January 1945.
Hosenfeld surrendered to the Soviets at Błonie, a small Polish city about 30 kilometers west of Warsaw. He truthfully stated that the sports office he headed was organizationally subordinate to the so-called IC Department. This information proved fatal for him, because in addition to assisting the troops, that department also carried out intelligence tasks.
To force Hosenfeld to provide information about his alleged espionage activities, he was subjected to brutal interrogation in Minsk prison. After six months of torture and solitary detention, he was a broken man and suffered his first stroke.
In a 1946 letter to his wife in West Germany, Hosenfeld named the Jews he had saved and begged her to contact them and ask them to arrange his release. On May 7, 1950, a military tribunal in Minsk, Belarus, sentenced him to 25 years of hard labor for alleged war crimes and sent him to a Soviet prison camp.
The one-page verdict stated that the trial was held in the absence of the defense. It said Hosenfeld had personally interrogated prisoners during the Warsaw Uprising and sent them to detention, thereby strengthening fascism in the struggle against the Soviet Union.
Six months after the trial, in November 1950, Leon Warm, who owed his life to Hosenfeld, came to visit Hosenfeld's wife in Thuringia, Germany. A Polish priest who had met Hosenfeld in the prisoner of war camp had found him and told him of his rescuer's predicament. Warm, who was about to immigrate from Europe, also wrote a letter to Szpilman in Warsaw.
When Szpilman learned the name of the German officer who had saved his life, he acted immediately and contacted the head of the Polish secret police, Jakub Berman. Berman visited Szpilman's home and said there was nothing he could do. He added that if the German were still in Poland, they could get him out, but their comrades in the Soviet Union would not let him go, saying the officer belonged to a detachment involved in spying. As a Pole, Berman said, he was powerless.
Wilhelm Hosenfeld was 57 years old and partially paralyzed when he died on August 13, 1952, in the Stalingrad prisoner of war camp. He passed away from internal bleeding caused by torture and serious maltreatment.
In 1957, Szpilman visited Hosenfeld's widow in Thuringia and told her that her husband was a hero who had saved his life. In 1998, Szpilman applied to Yad Vashem, Israel's official memorial to the victims of the Holocaust, to have his rescuer recognized.
By that time Leon Warm had already died, but his letter to Szpilman survived, and his sister wrote to Yad Vashem from Australia confirming her brother's rescue. Before the commission for the designation of the righteous could award the title, it had to be verified that Hosenfeld had not been involved in any war crimes.
Once his diaries and letters were made public, the case was submitted for the commission's review. Yad Vashem also received confirmation from the Polish commission for the investigation of Nazi crimes that his conduct had been untarnished.
On November 25, 2008, Yad Vashem posthumously recognized Hosenfeld as Righteous Among the Nations. On June 19, 2009, Israeli diplomats presented his son, Detlev, with the award in Berlin. There were many tears shed for Wilhelm Hosenfeld.